On a Scale of 1 to 10
by gypsy season
Summary: Sometimes they talk. Sometimes they are quiet. Sometimes, only one is quiet. Edward listens to Spike and Faye.


The engines were powered down, and save for the almost silent hum of life support and electricity, the Bebop was quiet. From her perch at the top of the stairs, Edward could hear the tiny clicking and clipping noises that she usually heard whenever Spike came back from a particularly nasty job, usually earning a score of at least a 5 on the chart in her head. She used the chart to rank the levels of nastiness of each job those tall people went off on. It kept her from being bored, having to wait on the ship for them to return.

Any job that ranked a 5 or higher had some particular sounds that Ed associated with them. First there is muttering and the occasionally uttered bad word, followed by some strange noises that sounded a lot like digging around inside a human body with a metal tweezer, which usually led to more of those nasty bad words, and then a loud clang or two when whatever whoever was looking for inside Spike's body had been found and pulled out. Then some snip-snips could be heard, and then concluded with the following choices of footsteps, a heavy sigh, or both. Then came the inevitable sound of the old couch shifting under the sudden collapse of a body onto it.

Occasionally, with a rank of 9 or 10, there are no sounds at all from Spike, no curses or sighs or anything at all. This usually led to a lot more talking from Faye, quiet talking, like she's thinking out loud about something real important. But with the exception of the 9s and the 10's, most jobs just had nasty words and even nastier tones of voice, swearing and sighing and other sounds that expressed nothing but misery.

All these funny little noises made up a symphony which Ed liked to call 'Spikesounds.'

Ein whimpered and rolled over in his sleep. Down in the common room, metal clicked and clanged and Spike yelled at Faye. After a few moments of heavy breathing on Spike's part and harmless mocking on Faye's, the sounds gave way to the hum of the Bebop's electricity. Ed eventually got bored with Spikesounds and flopped on her side, curling up around Ein's smelly doggy body and falling asleep.

"Let me tell you what you need to do," Spike said.

Faye was presently absorbed with stitching up the hole in Spike's arm, and didn't register anything he said. After months of playing nursmaid to Spike and his frustrating habit of getting himself cut open and shot and otherwise ridiculously injured, she had grown quite accustom to dealing with blood, stitches, bandages, and anything he might try to say to her. "Hold still," was her automatic reply.

"I'm not moving," he protested, sounding so much like a child that Faye gave the wire she was threading through his arm a quick yank to keep him quiet.

"Shit! Shit, Faye!" He swore and recoiled, pulling his arm out of her hands and cradling it protectively against his chest.

"I thought I told you," she drawled, unable to keep from smirking, "to hold still." Then, in a rare act of either compassion or boredom, she waited patiently and quietly for Spike to come around. Eventually, with a sigh and a few muttered curses, he gave her his arm again, letting her go back to work. With a bullet wound in his right arm, three broken fingers on his left hand and an absent Jet, there was no other way his arm would get stitched.

With all the yanking and pulling that had just happened with Spikes arm, it was no surprise when a thin stream of blood slid down from the hole that Faye had just been trying to stitch up.

"You're impossible," Faye said, wiping the blood away with a rag. Spike just blinked up at her, and toyed with possibly trying to talk to her again. If she was stitching him up, she had all the power, and was therefore very likely to abuse it. If Spike said something Faye didn't like, he risked getting a new hole blown into his arm. However, if Faye wasn't stitching his arm, she could just walk away when Spike tried talking to her, lock herself in her bunk or go off wherever it was that women went on ships... He had a choice to make.

"So," he said, once Faye picked up the needle and tweezers again; Spike had made his choice. "As I was saying; this is what you have to do."

"About what?" She sounded annoyed. Dangerous.

"Suppose you get, I don't know, four million for a job. Instead of blowing it off at the racetrack or-"

Faye cut him off with another yank. "Nothing like gratitude to get me through the day. You really know how to treat a woman."

Spike was grinning, despite his eyes threatening to fill with tears from the pain in his arm. "Instead of blowing it off at the racetrack or the casino or somewhere," he continued, "take half of it, and just put it away."

"You're not seriously having this discussion with me," Faye said, slightly incredulous and a bit insulted. "You're not seriously trying to teach me about saving money."

"Never say I didn't try to help," Spike said, and then fell silent. The deep throbbing agony in his arm was as good a reason as any to let the subject go and keep quiet.

Faye continued to stitch, scowling the whole way through. She probably was wishing for one of those 9 or 10 rank jobs when Spike didn't say anything at all, the jobs when Spike just lay there on the couch and let Faye do her work. When Spike was unconscious.

But Spike had surprised her with how quiet he kept that Faye found she actually had time to think. Saving half of her earnings would mean more to actually spend instead of just gamble. Half her earnings would mean new clothes, new shoes, new guns, maybe even a new ship one of these days. Then again... why save half her earnings when she could just double them? She just kept choosing the wrong animals. And then again, why was it any of Spike's business what she did with her money?

"Don't touch," she snapped, after the stitching was over and done with.

Spike was examining her work, gently prodding the newly stitched wound with his ring finger and pinky, the only two fingers on his left hand that weren't broken and splinted. He just sat there and looked at her, still doing that whole 'quiet' thing. So Faye decided to prod him a bit.

"So, genius. What do you expect me to do with all that extra money?"

"I don't know," he said. Typical. "Pay off your debts? Save it for a rainy day?"

Faye didn't like those answers one bit. Her business was none of Spike's. "It doesn't rain in space, lunkhead."

"Fine," he said. 'Night, Faye."

But really, she did have debs. Serious debts. Debts which she could see no possible freedom from anytime soon. Faye liked freedom, liked the smell of it, the taste, feel; everything about it inspired her and urged her to move forwards. So when Spike stood up and made to leave, Faye caught his wrist.

"Wait, you're going to sleep?"

Spike must have learned his lesson about the agony that yanking and pulling could cause, so he just let her hold his wrist. "Yup. Long day."

"But you were just giving me advice!"

"Which you graciously turned down," he said. Then: "Can I have my arm back, please?"

And because he had said please, and because he had actually asked her, Faye obliged.

--

Later, much later, after many months had gone by, Ed watches as Faye cuts off Spike's clothes.

"Why ya doing that, Faye-Faye?" She asks as the scissor snip up Spike's jacket.

"So I can see better," Faye says.

Snip snip goes Spike's pants, and Ed giggles. "Spikey likey-s his suit, though. Wears it all the time."

"He'll get over it," Faye says.

Spike's shirt, which Ed had always remembered was yellow, is red, and soon meets its bitter end at the hand of the demon scissor and the purple-haired lady who wields it.

"Gross," Ed says, when the cutting of Spike's shirt reveals a whole mess of blood even redder than Spike's newly red (and newly ruined) shirt. Faye swears until her words get stuck in her throat.

"This is a ten," Ed says quietly. "Right?"

Faye takes a deep breath. "Go get Jet."

--

He sleeps quietly for a very long time, until the sound that had permeated his sleep makes itself obvious enough for him to recognize that it is indeed a snore. Snore, after snore, too loud to be excused as normal sleepy breathing, though just enough of a snore to annoy him instead of drive him insane.

And then he becomes aware of his body, because he's shaking like he's freezing but there's a blanket on him and the air is warm and there might be sunlight coming through a window, or maybe it's only a heat lamp, but he's still shaking. And then there's Faye.

Slumped in a chair, her hair bunched up where she's leaning against a window, she sleeps. There is no blood pouring out of her, no bullet holes. The rise and fall of her chest confirms this.

Because you can never be sure.

"Faye," he tries, his voice sounding like something between a whisper and a garbage disposal. Still, it's a noise, and he tries again a few times before it gets the job done, and she's sitting up in the chair, her hair sticking up like Ed's.

"Hey," she says, not a trace of sleep in her voice. "Are you in pain?"

"Sure," Spike says, his tongue feeling like a weight in his mouth and making it awkward to talk.

"Hold on," she says, and rushes off to somewhere Spike can't see. She's only gone a few seconds, hurrying back to his side. Spike doesn't even feel the stick of the needle in him, just the beautiful feeling of numbness that instantly starts to spread across his body until he can't even tell that he's shaking anymore.

But then he looks back up at Faye, having almost forgotten that she was there, and sees everything he needs to see on her face. And then there's how quiet she is, like she's just waiting for him to say something, which she never does. Faye never waits for him.

"'m I dying?" Because if Faye waited all this time for him to talk to her, he might as well try.

"You better not," was her reply.

Spike sighed. "I love it... when you're nice to me."

Considering how his tongue and mouth refused to work properly, and considering the sedatives that continued to numb him, Spike couldn't quite manage to say anything in english, and Faye didn't understand a word of it.

He had meant to ask her about the windows, about the sunlight coming in through the glass, because they were definitely not on the Bebop, but his eyes closed and he gave in to the numbness.

--

There is nothing in the world that Spike wanted more than a steak. Thick, rare, ridiculously bloody. It takes all his willpower to settle for the broth Faye brings him instead. Of course he knows that eating actual food will probably tear open his still-healing stomach, but he can't help but push Faye's buttons a little.

"Food," he begs. "I need food."

"That's all you're getting," Faye says, clasping her hands together to keep from hitting Spike, which would only lead to more blood for her to clean up.

"This is why I'm so scrawny," Spike says. "You're always calling me skinny. It's because I never have any food."

"There is a hole in your stomach. Do you even realize that?"

"Your cooking's shit, I wouldn't eat anything you made anyway."

"Please," Faye cries, "please tell me you're in pain so I can just tranquilize you."

"Steak," Spike insists. "Or a burger. I'm not picky."

"Maybe euthanize you?"

"Faaaaye," he moans, letting his head fall back against the pillows. Just outside the door, he can hear Edward singing to herself:

"Youth in Asia, youth in Asia, EUTHANASIA!!!"

"That reminds me," Spike says, his eyes fixed on the door. "What's the kid doing here? Didn't she leave?"

"Didn't you leave?" says Faye, watching Spike, who is still watching the door. "People come back, Spike."

"You mean people get _dragged_ back," he says.

Faye purses her lips and tries not to think about what she knows Spike is referring to. Instead, she leaves the broth on the table and goes out into the hall to take her anger out on Ed. While Faye never much liked to victimize a child, she'd rather rage at someone who didn't risk tearing stitches and bleeding out all over the floor.

--

It takes all the strength in her to drag Spike back to the Bebop, and she literally has to drag him, physically, grab his arm and drag the lunkhead through the street because, this time, he really is a lunkhead. The man had somehow managed to get himself knocked hard enough on the head to knock away all of his memories.

Spike with amnesia is funny, to say the least. Not funny like something Faye would laugh at, but funny like something Faye would laugh at if only it weren't so tragic. Spike with amnesia is quiet, cautious, completely and selflessly terrified. Faye expected him to have retained at least a little of his dispassion, his nonchalance, but this Spike just sits there, like a lunkhead.

Ed ranks it a 10, because from where she is curled up at the top of the stairs, she can't hear any Spikesounds at all, and assumes that no sound means that Spike must be unconscious. For a little while, Spike actually was unconscious, because he had fainted. But now he just sits, holding an ice pack to his head, looking sad and scared and pathetic.

"Does it hurt?" Faye asks, only to get the idiot talking. If she could just talk to someone, then maybe she could forget about how Spike getting hit was probably her fault.

Spike doesn't really respond, though, except for a timid "mm-hmm". He tenses up and slides farther down the couch when Faye comes and sits down next to him.

"You seriously need to relax," she says. "I'm not going to do anything to you."

Spike shrugs. "Well you did kidnap me."

"Excuse me?" Faye starts. "Are you fucking kidding me right now? I didn't kidnap you, you lunkhead!"

Spike blinks, and waits for something that actually makes sense to his addled brain.

"This ship we're on? You live here. I live here. Jet lives here. Kid and her dog live here."

"Dog on a spaceship?" Spike asks, sounding slightly surprised.

"Long story," Faye says. "Don't ask me. You'll remember it soon enough."

"If you say so," Spike says, scratches the side of his nose, examines the room he's in.

Faye is just happy that he doesn't seem to remember any of his fighting skills. Otherwise, she'd probably end up flat on her back and Spike would be half a planet away from her.

After what seems like days, Spike says, "Are we... you and me...?"

"Not a chance," Faye says with a laugh. It amuses her to no end that Spike slumps, seemingly crestfallen, at this reply.

Only two days go by before Spike gets his memories back. The bump on his head is as big as ever, red and black and swollen, but now his eyes narrow when Faye walks past him. "I cannot believe..." he says, sounding incredibly aggravated, "I asked you that."

"Got your memories back, then?" Faye asks.

"Damn straight," Spike says.

"Lunkhead."

--

Like all things in life, there is variety. Sometimes, Ed only gives a ranking of 1. Sometimes, Spike will get a paper cut. Sucking on his finger, he'll stalk down the hall, knock on Faye's door, and wait while she takes her own damn time to answer it.

"Got a band-aid?" he says.

She says, "Sure", and steps away from the door to let Spike in.

Then the door closes, and Edward doesn't hear anything at all.


End file.
